PELE
Elephant (Polyvinyl Record Co.)
Reviewed by Erick Mertz

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Watching a football's oblong shape bounce between hash marks is a humorous display of lopsided fumbling symmetry. It doesn't quite roll like a baseball, nor will it neatly rebound into the hands of its receiver. There is a quality of stubbornness in its movement; a reluctance to go down easily. But if the oblong pigskin catches the turf properly it can careen in and out of paws and find itself grappled for savagely as it lopes in an astoundingly unpredictable pattern.

Getting hold of Pele's disc Elephant is a lot like this. A lot like this and perhaps more. The three piece band's newly reissued album sounds like what might happen if the Minutemen and The Sea and Cake decided to take a country drive in a flatbed Ford jamming all the while on their Pig Nose amps. It blisters, it sends tracers across the ceiling of your now extraordinary room and ultimately retains an incredible vitality years after initial release.

Entirely instrumental, the songs on Elephant are densely layered orchestrations. Songs like "Egg" and "Little Hunts" are emblematic of most everything contained on the record, in their multi-faceted sprawling grasp of rock and roll's boundless capabilities. At intermittent times throughout each of these tracks, they come to resemble country, punk and blues standards. As bonus tracks there are three live songs recorded on Air West in Tokyo Japan, the most stunning of which is "Safe Dolphin." As the background crowd rises to cheer them on, it becomes quickly apparent that this astoundingly unpredictable pattern indeed has won a savage following. Here is to more albums just like Elephant.

© 2003 - Erick Mertz